Multi-Table Tournament (MTT) Strategy

Multi-table tournaments are a hugely popular form of poker. The possibility of turning a modest buy-in into a huge score is difficult to resist and the poker boom propelled this excitement into millions of homes across the world. The standard of the average player and the variety and size of games available have been changing ever since.

What is considered the best and most popular MTT strategy for beating both the live and online events has been evolving too. The classic poker tournament strategy books such as Tournament Poker for Advanced Players, and Harrington on Hold’Em introduced many players to the ideas necessary to beat MTTs. The tight aggressive style became very popular amongst good players, which lead to a rise in the general level of play that you could expect to see in these tournaments. More recent books such as Kill Everyone have progressed past this strategy to a more loose aggressive style.

Today’s MTT games

Despite an increase in player ability there is still plenty of money to be made playing MTTs today, and they continue to draw a large number of recreational players. The best players nowadays have become looser while maintaining a very aggressive style to take advantage of both the weaker players’ passivity and the wider ranges of other loose players. Stealing is still a powerful tool for increasing your chip stack, but it has become so common that now re-steals are increasingly important. Our article on re-stealing discusses this further.

Today’s MTT strategy focuses on making plus EV plays that will increase your equity in the tournament while also adjusting to stack sizes and different players’ tendencies. The creation of ICM calculators and other poker software has allowed serious players to take their games to the next level by studying the expected values of poker decisions in more detail. Check out our article on The Independent Chip Model for an introduction to this important topic.

The internet has become an important resource for players who wish to study areas of the game where a player can gain an edge. There is a lot of information available on concepts such as playing on the bubble with different stack sizes, adjusting to different opponents, multi-tabling and ICM.

Multi-table tournaments give you a shot at making a big score. The articles you will find here will introduce you to concepts that will help increase your chances of making that score.